We are excited to announce that MLB.com/blogs, approaching its 11th season as the leading baseball blogging community, has moved its popular PRO blogs to a terrific new blogging platform at Medium.com. Soon the overall move from WordPress.com will impact our existing fan blogs as well, so this is an update for everyone involved.

Background

First, a bit about Medium. Launched in 2012, it was developed by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams to provide a platform for longer-form writing. It features a full visual editor user interface, can handle multiple forms of embedded multimedia content, and uses a system of tagging, sharing, and recommendations to group and promote articles within its network.

Networking. The odds of your blog surfacing to a fresh set of eyes will be higher than ever before with Medium’s expansive reach. The new platform excels at placing links to your articles on related articles within the network, where it’s likelier to find greater exposure. As a result, Medium expects to provide nearly a 40-percent traffic bump to content on the network.

A culture of reading. Other platforms are geared more to publishing than being read. Medium’s audience skews younger and is engaged and well informed. Readers come to Medium to consume meaningful, quality content. And their growing audience is “sticky,” meaning readers spend a considerable amount of time on the site, consuming a series of related articles.

The neighborhood. The new Bill Simmons venture, The Ringer, launched earlier this year on Medium, joining SI’s The Cauldron and the NBA. The Italian football club AS Roma is on board as well. We will be positioned alongside these high-profile sports entities as Medium continues its push to become a hub of sports content.

What it means to you

We invite you to move your own blog over to Medium as soon as possible and continue to be part of our new MLB.com/blogs community. Just create one using your Twitter account, the easiest way to get started. If you do, please by all means leave a comment on our hub blog at MLB.com/blogs simply listing your URL. Then we will continue to help promote your blog as we always did, surfacing PRO and fan blogs regularly. That page is promoted across MLB.com.

Only the pre-existing PRO blogs will keep their familiar “mlblogs.com” domains from this point forward. Between now and the end of 2016, any fan blogs with those domains will revert to a “wordpress.com” domain. WordPress is directly messaging bloggers who will be affected. The old addresses will continue to work for some time after the switchover there.

In addition, the four MLB themes used in recent years at WordPress (PRO, Fan, Modern and Retro) will be retired. Bloggers who stay with WordPress will need to choose new themes from them.

You’ll immediately notice some slightly different lingo when you blog at Medium. Your WordPress blog becomes a “publication” on Medium, and your blog posts now are “articles.” The visual editor ultimately is very similar to what you’re used to, but some things do operate slightly differently and you’ll notice some unique functionalities the first time you write on Medium. We’ll make sure you have a guide to writing on Medium to make your transition as seamless as possible.

Even if you aren’t planning to blog at Medium, it’s a good idea to start an account there just so you can continue to follow certain PRO blogs so that you are notified immediately when a new entry is saved. While the URL for that blog will not change, you will need to start a Medium account in order to continue receiving such notifications. To do so, visit Medium.com, click on the “Sign In / Sign Up” button in the upper right corner, and sign up using Twitter, Facebook, Google or by using your email address. After creating your Medium account, please visit that blog at the familiar URL, click “FOLLOW” and make sure to check the box next to “Receive Letters in your inbox.”

We’re excited about moving MLB.com/blogs to a new platform, and we think you’ll enjoy using Medium. If you have any questions at all about this process or Medium in general, please don’t hesitate to ask us right here.

Jon SooHoo is in his 30th year as a photographer covering the Dodgers, and he just celebrated the anniversary with one of the greatest shots of his career. SooHoo, whose LA Photog Blog has been one of the most popular spaces at MLB.com/blogs over the past five years, captured the widely seen photo Tuesday at Wrigley Field of Cub fan Keith Hartley interfering with Adrian Gonzalez and catching a baseball while holding his baby. The umps got it right, the fan got the ball, baby Isaac got fed, and SooHoo got the remarkable shot. I traded emails with SooHoo today for a first-hand account of the photo, plus some of the follow-up photos he took at the bottom of this Q&A. Take a look:

What was your reaction when you knew you were getting this photo?

Most of the time I carry a body with long lens and a body with a short zoom lens and because the photo wells are so close to the fans and the field, you never know what you can get if you bring the extra body with a smaller zoom. This play I had the camera up to begin with and once I could see the ball in flight and knew it wasn’t close to hitting me, I started to focus on Adrian as he came closer and then it happened.

Can you describe your proximity with regard to the photogs’ well and the fan?

I was in the first base photo well and I had the far right position in the well. The ironic part is that there were two empty seats between me and Mr. Hartley who just so happened to leave their seats after we hit three outs earlier. Everything happens for a reason when the Godforce is involved.

Did Adrian see the pic, and any reaction from him?

I didn’t ask him as we were all trying to make the first bus.

Dodgers photographer Jon SooHoo

Did you have any interaction with Hartley after the play?

I did. I showed him the picture and he was pretty geeked about it. It was quite overwhelming.

What was he (and the baby) like after this happened?

He was pumped, posing for pictures and TV interviews.

Obviously you had to return to other subjects on the field, but just wondering what happened after you got the shot.

This is only my second day being able to transmit my images live, from my camera to my ipad out through my email to the Dodger Social Media guy Matt Mesa, who put the image up.

Where does this rank among the best baseball photos you have ever taken…from your own point of view? When you look at it closer, you even have Adrian seemingly looking at you, and you can see how closely the first-base umpire and crew chief Jerry Meals is following it, before he initially ruled it a foul ball.

It ranks way up there due to all of the factors coming into play: (1) Going live from camera to iPad to email the night before; (2) The right camera equipment at the right time; (3) the two fans between us leaving their seats; (4) the catch; and (5) the house wireless signal strong enough to get the picture out.

Really enjoyed seeing the Rangers’ Bark in the Park recap post by Kaylan Eastepp, the Rangers’ director of interactive and social media. This is one you have to see. Follow the Sweet Spot in Baseball blog, and join us at the all-new MLB.com/blogs portal as we surface cool posts around the baseball community. And as long as we’re on the subject, I’m going to take this opportunity to give some love to my English Bulldog, King Bingley (OK and my wife, sorry), so feel free to comment here or at MLB.com/blogs with shots of your own baseball pet.

Make sure you hang out regularly at MLB.com/blogs and leave your blog’s URL in the comments there as it’s easy traffic to your site from our main blogs gateway. And tell Kayla we sent you over there. She might even have tips on how to score a job in baseball.

After you vote to decide starters for the 86th Midsummer Classic this summer, Blog the Ballot. We’re surfacing posts about the 2015 Esurance MLB All-Star Game Ballot at MLB.com/blogs, so please just leave your Permalink there so we can highlight and send more traffic to your blog. We’ll list yours among our ongoing rollout of posts. Spread the word about the all-new MLB.com/blogs…

Have you heard the news? We’re now “MLB.com/blogs” and we just relaunched Major League Baseball’s blogging community with a new look to coincide with the 10th blogaversary of Tommy’s first post. Read all about it at the new home for MLB.com/blogs.

Make sure you follow MLB.com/blogs because that’s the page where you’ll find cool new and existing fan and PRO blogs going forward. Check out the RSS feeds there, updated by category. If you have questions and comments about MLB.com/blogs, you can still use this community blog to reach us. We might even bring back Latest Leaders, or some kind of version of them.

It’s a little bit of a work in progress, but the whole goal is to surface more blogs and to use an actual WordPress.com blog as the gateway for MLB.com/blogs. It won’t impact anything you are currently doing to blog.

If you have a baseball blog, be sure to leave your URL and say hi in the comments at MLB.com/blogs.

Like this:

John Thorn, Official Historian for Major League Baseball and veteran MLB PRO Blogger, has been answering quite a few historical questions from fans on Twitter of late. For the responses requiring more than 140 characters, John has introduced a new feature to his popular blog that is required reading for all baseball fans. It’s called #AskTheHistorian and encourages fans to submit their questions that they’d like to see him address. So fire away with your toughest historical queries, and if you’re not already following Our Game, make sure to click the “Sign me up!” button on the right side of his blog to sign up for email notifications of new posts.

Picking a bat is kind of like picking a blog. Sometimes the other ones have more hits.

Happy Holidays. I’d like to take this opportunity to re-introduce MLB.com Blogs Central, the community blog for MLB.com and MLB.com/blogs. When you see the new array of bats in the custom theme here, just think of approaching a batrack in a dugout and the fabulous choices at your fingertips. That represents the array of choices you should find as a regular right here.

As you’ve probably noticed lately, we’re now using this blog to highlight much of the excellent, topical content around here with Reblogs of select posts from both MLB PRO and FAN blog themes. We’ll showcase some deserving blogs in this community much more dynamically — in real time as opposed to just once a month. It’s a great way to stay on top of what’s happening around baseball while discovering some quality blogs and growing your own.

So first of all, make sure you’re Following this blog. If you are logged in, you should have a Follow option in the top toolbar. We also recommend subscribing to our email updates via the button in the widget to the right so you don’t miss a thing. Posts from here will naturally become more frequent as a result, and I’ll no longer compile Latest Leaders rankings.

If you come across a blog post you think is outstanding or have a post of your own that you’re particularly proud of, by all means please leave a comment here and make sure to include the Permalink URL so others can find you. (Just don’t list your own blog here every single post, though, or your commenting would be treated as spam and require subsequent approval.) And definitely continue to use your community blog as you have all these years, whether you are a rookie blogger saying hello with an introduction or a veteran interacting with longtime friends.

April will mark the 10th anniversary of the best baseball blogging community here at MLB.com/blogs, a place where we at Major League Baseball Advanced Media partner with our friends at WordPress.com to provide the most cutting-edge blogging software anywhere. We hope you will find this community blog helpful to your discovery of other bloggers and in surfacing cool posts, as part of the total MLB.com experience. A good blog is kind of like one of the bats in this picture — a trusted companion, but you still want to try some others out.

Like this:

Very proud to be one of 392 MLB.com staffers who took the #ALSIceBucketChallenge today at work and raised $39,200 to fight ALS, but more importantly I would like to thank Pete Frates for his courageous fight and all he has done to make sure people know about the same disease that took the life of Lou Gehrig about three-quarters of a century before.

Above is the video of our participation today, coming one day after Commissioner-Elect Rob Manfred, Joe Torre and 165 MLB central-office staffers took the challenge in Midtown Manhattan (see my story here).

Our MLB Advanced Media crew (BAMMERS) are based at Chelsea Market. Our MLB Network and MLB Productions crew did the same in Secaucus. We did our Ice Bucket Challenge in ballpark-wave style. You can find plenty of pictures here.

It has been great to see so many #ALSIceBucketChallenge posts around the MLB.com/blogs community this past week or so, such as the Tribe’s or the Mets broadcasters or the Tigers. You don’t have to look far. It seems like all of us are doing it, typically on our Facebook posts. We’ve tried to aggregate and share some of our favorite ones on the MLB.com/blogs homepage, and I hope you will please leave a Permalink URL here with your own #ALSIceBucketChallenge posts.

Personally, I challenged a whole host of family after this morning’s cold bath on an NYC sidewalk, and that includes my English Bulldog King Bingley. Don’t worry, it won’t be cruelty to animals; he is all over it. Hey, this is what you look like after a decade of running MLB.com/blogs, what can I say:

And then after breaking dress code with “drenchable attire” in the morning, we changed back to our usual customary dress code of jeans and T-shirts, because that’s how we roll when making sites and posting stuff and so forth. Thanks, Pete!

Meta

MLB.com/blogs Community

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